


everybody's got a little piece of someone they hide

by thirty2flavors



Category: Borderlands (Video Games), Tales from the Borderlands - Fandom
Genre: Awkward Flirting, Character Study, F/M, Light Angst, Missing Scene, episode 3 roadtrip
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-04-06
Updated: 2017-04-06
Packaged: 2018-10-15 06:32:01
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,197
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10551662
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thirty2flavors/pseuds/thirty2flavors
Summary: Telling Sasha the truth—that he’d sort-of-accidentally given Handsome Jack control of a gun three feet away from her—seemed like a Bad Idea with a capital Bad.





	

**Author's Note:**

> Set during the episode 3 road trip montage.

“Right.” Sasha hopped to her feet and dusted the sand from the back of her pants so aggressively that Rhys, seated next to her at the campfire, leaned away for fear of breathing it in. “Well, I’ll be back.”

“What? Where are you going?”

“For a walk,” she said plainly.

“A walk? Now? Here?” he repeated incredulously. “Just… a peaceful nighttime walk alone through the terrifying Pandoran desert in the middle of the night?”

“Yeah.” Unphased, Sasha grabbed a bag from the inside of the open caravan door and slung it over her shoulder. “You... wanna come?”

He raised an eyebrow. “Uh, no, not particularly.” Infinitely dangerous as Pandora was in the day, Pandora by night—away from even the illusion of security offered by a campfire and a working vehicle—was an unqualified horror. “Sounds kind of nightmarish, actually.”

It seemed Sasha didn’t feel the same; she shrugged, then pulled the strap of her bag over her shoulders. “Well, okay. See you later.”

With that, she started off towards the horizon, fading from the firelight and making her way towards the rock outcropping in the distance. Rhys watched her go, contemplating Sasha’s definition of relaxation and how she might react to a day at the spa (boredom? delight? restlessness? confusion?), before leaning back on the heels of his hands and surveying the remaining group.

Because Rhys had felt weird about leaving poor, paralyzed Vaughn alone inside the caravan, he was propped up against a boulder, facing away from the smoke. Fiona looked deceptively peaceful, curled up and fast asleep atop the jacket she’d meticulously arranged so as not to crush the collar. Further from the fire, Loader Bot and Gortys were two minutes deep into a comparison of who knew the most digits of pi (thusfar a tie, as far as Rhys could tell, based on their synchronized recitation).

All of which left Athena, hunched over as she played the single most intense-looking game of solitaire Rhys had ever seen in his life.

She must have felt him staring, because she looked up from her cards and sat up straighter, looking either embarrassed or combative—it was hard to tell. An excruciating second of silence passed where they simply looked at each other.

Athena broke their staring contest first, followed by the silence. “Oh. It’s just us.” She looked at the others, paused, and looked back at him. “Do you... want something? Should we… talk?”

She sounded about as pained by the notion as he felt; Rhys could make conversation with everyone in the caravan, frozen Vaughn included, more easily than with Athena.

He reflexively let out a nervous laugh that, if anything, only made the atmosphere more awkward. “Actually, you know what, I think I will go for a walk with Sasha, after all. Cardio, right?”  

“Sure,” said Athena, “Cardio.”

If he hadn’t known better, he’d have thought she sounded amused.

* * *

 

Catching up to Sasha didn’t take long, although it did take enough energy that he slowed several feet behind her before calling her name in hope of masking the fact that he was winded.

“Sasha! Hey, wait up!”

It was only as she turned towards him, eyebrows raised in surprise, that he suddenly realized her earlier offer may not have been genuine. Quite possibly she had never really intended for him to join her and had only asked to keep up some degree of civility, relying on his cowardice to save her.  

But her look of surprise was replaced by an amused smile, one hand on her hip. She didn’t look _un_ happy to see him.

“Changed your mind?”

Relieved he hadn’t just half-jogged from one socially awkward situation into another, he walked the distance between them, his right palm held out as a flashlight.

“Well, you know, thought you might need some company, and, frankly, it seemed ungentlemanly to let you wander the dark by yourself, so—”  
  
“You’re scared of Athena, aren’t you?”

“Terrified,” he agreed.

Sasha snorted. She turned back the direction she’d been walking, and Rhys fell into step next to her.

“She’s not going to hurt you,” said Sasha. “I mean, probably not.” She paused for effect. “At least, Fiona and I would stop her if she did.” Pause. “Probably.” Pause. “After a few good hits.”  
  
“Wow. That’s sweet.”

Sasha snickered again. “Sorry, am I being _ungentlemanly_?”

Rhys threw his hands into the air. “You know what? I'm taking my chances with Athena.”

But Sasha laughed and caught his bicep as he turned to leave. “Okay, okay, I'm sorry, I promise to stop Athena if she tries to kill you, which she won’t. Alright?”

Rhys blinked down at her hand on his arm. Her grip wasn't strong, but her touch pinned him in place effectively anyway; he was pretty sure he couldn't have walked away or, well, done much of anything, even if he wanted to.

“If you insist,” he said, hoping he sounded much cooler than he felt.

Sasha grinned as she let go of his arm, her free hand moving to adjust the strap of her shoulder bag before she started walking again. Rhys kept a step behind her, illuminating their path with his hand and watching Sasha curiously. For someone willingly wandering about a deathtrap in the middle of the night, she looked perfectly at ease. He was kind of jealous; he still hadn’t shaken the feeling that every single thing on Pandora, down to the individual grains of sand, wished him ill, specifically.

Sasha reached up to adjust her headband, shooting him a self-conscious smile as she did so.

Rhys swallowed. Well. Maybe not _everything_ on Pandora.

He smiled back at her, plucking at the strap of her bag with one finger. “So what’s in the bag?”

“You’ll see,” she said, with an air of unnecessary mystery. “It’s a surprise.” Then she narrowed her eyes suspiciously and pointed a reprimanding finger towards his ECHO eye. “And don’t do that… thing.”

She clutched the bag tighter to her side, an action completely ineffective at preventing him from scanning anything, though he didn’t have the heart to tell her that. Instead he raised a hand in surrender.

“Okay, no peeking in the mystery bag, got it.”

Satisfied, Sasha nodded. She led them through the middle of a rock outcropping, and Rhys glanced behind them; the caravan, the campfire and the rest of the group were obscured from view.

“Are we going somewhere in particular?”

Sasha shrugged. “Sort of. I’ll know it when I see it.”

She stopped for a moment, searching their surroundings, apparently looking for something although Rhys couldn’t imagine what there was to find.

“Well,” he began, “if you’re looking for a bunch of rock and sand, you’ve come to—”  
  
“There we go!” Sasha cut him off, pointing to a hill of rock that looked to Rhys to be no different from every other hill of rock. She took off in that direction, bag jostling at her side. “Come on!”

Rhys ran after her, grateful that the length of his legs helped him compensate for Sasha’s actual speed. She finally came to a stop as they reached a rock ledge not much taller than she was, a more-or-less flat surface that stretched a couple feet in each direction. She ran her hand along the surface, inspecting it for God-knows-what, before she grinned again and nodded approvingly.

“Perfect.”

“Uh... yeah,” said Rhys, eyeing it skeptically and trying to feign enthusiasm. “Rocks. Cool. Totally way better than all the other rocks.”

Sasha ignored him. She plunged a hand into her mystery bag, pulling out one empty beer bottle. “Ta-dah!”

He stared. “I... don’t get it. What’s that for?”

She waggled the bottle enticingly between two fingers. “Spin the bottle, duh.”

The night air suddenly rose in temperature about sixty degrees, and Rhys felt his mouth go dry. “Oh. _Oh_. Uh. Really? But there’s only two of us. I mean—not that—uh—”

“Okay, that was _obviously_ a joke,” said Sasha, eyeing him oddly before she reached up to place the bottle on top of the rock ledge.

Rhys forced a laugh, hoping the dark was enough to hide the fact that his face probably looked like it was on fire. “Ha, yeah, obviously. Same.”

Mercifully, Sasha was preoccupied with her bag, pulling out a second bottle, then a third, and a fourth, and an empty can, lining them all up along the rock like some weird art installation. She kept going, her bag getting lighter and lighter, and Rhys stepped back out of her way, watching with equal parts interest and confusion.

“There,” said Sasha, balancing the last of the cans and standing back to examine her handiwork.

“Wow, we drink a lot,” he observed.

Sasha tilted her head. “Yeah.” Then she turned, walking away from her creation.

Rhys looked back and forth between her and the rock, totally perplexed. “What? Is that it? You just… Did you just walk all the way out here to get rid of our garbage?” He looked at it again. “By littering?”

Sasha came to a stop about twenty feet away. “No.” She stuck her hand back into her mostly-empty bag and pulled out one of her beloved, enormous guns. “It’s target practice.”

“Oh.” It took a second, and then it clicked properly, and his eyes widened. “Oh!”

Gun balanced on her hip, Sasha laughed at him as he scrambled out of the way and over to her.

“You realize I wasn’t going to shoot at _you_ ,” she chided. She let the empty bag slide off her shoulder onto the ground. “Actually, I’m not going to shoot at all yet, you are.”

“What—” he began, then broke off with a soft _oof_ noise as Sasha shoved the gun at him and he lifted his arms out of the way. “Oh, no, no, I don’t think that’s—”

“Come on,” she wheedled, still stubbornly holding it against his stomach for him to take. “It’s about time you learned how to use one of these, there’s enough people trying to kill you.”

She had a point. Still, he resisted, hands in the air like this was a strangely-executed stick-up. “I dunno, Sasha, the whole… guns and combat thing is really not—”  
  
“Your thing? Yeah, I’ve seen you in a fight, I’ve noticed. That’s the point.” She raised her eyebrows, then sighed, softening. “Look, you’re scared of your own shadow here on Pandora, right? I’m just trying to help.” She smirked. “You know, in case Fiona or I aren’t around to save your gangly ass.”

Rhys put his hands on his hips. “I’m choosing to hear your concern and not the insult with which you expressed it.” But Sasha’s look was imploring, and she _did_ have a point, so he sighed and relented, cradling the gun like an extremely dangerous baby. “Okay, fine.”

Sasha beamed, an image he decided to cherish in the likely event that this somehow got both of them killed.

“Great.” She looked at the gun, her lips twitching in barely-concealed amusement. “Um… well, lesson one, don’t hold it so strange. Here.”

She moved in closer, taking his hands in hers as she adjusted his grip, closed his metal hand around the handle beneath the muzzle of the gun, pushed his shoulders into position.

He let her pose him like a Barbie, staring down at the top of her hair the whole time. His heartbeat, he noticed suddenly, was very loud. Was it always this loud? Could Sasha hear it? Did she think it was weird?

“Oh, cool, are we shooting stuff?” came a voice.

Even though he _really_ should have been used to it by now, Jack’s voice nearly made Rhys jump out of his skin.

“Whoa, are you okay?” asked Sasha, oblivious to the fact that Handsome Jack was now standing two feet in front of her, looking on with an interest that could not possibly end well.

“Yeah… yeah, fine,” said Rhys, scowling at Jack as discreetly as he could manage. “Just, uh, got a chill, sorry.”

“Nice cover,” said Jack sarcastically, right as Sasha said, “A chill? It’s like eighty degrees out here.”

Doing his best to ignore Jack, Rhys shrugged.

The suspicious look on Sasha’s face didn’t last very long, and she turned back to the task at hand, moving his finger closer to the trigger.

“Okay, just aim for…” She pointed towards her makeshift firing range. “...well, anything, really. Maybe that bottle in the middle there?”

But the bottle she pointed towards was obscured by Jack, whose attention was trained on the gun.

“Ooh, let me do it,” said Jack. He looked up at Rhys expectantly, wiggling the fingers of both hands in invitation. “C’mon, it’ll be so good. Just gimme a teensy bit of control of your body, c’mon, what’s the worst that could happen?”

“Absolutely not,” hissed Rhys through gritted teeth.

“Uh, okay,” said Sasha, taking a step back, folding her arms and looking away. “Pick a different one, then.”

Rhys winced at her dejection. _God_ , the secret-side-conversation-with-a-ghost thing was hard on interpersonal relationships.

“Oh, no, I just—I meant—I will absolutely… not… be… as bad as you’re expecting! Ha.”

Sasha stared at him like he was insane, which was probably a reasonable deduction. Rhys smiled back feebly.

“You got a real way with words, kid,” said Jack flatly. He glanced at Sasha, then sidled up to Rhys, still holding out his right arm as if on offer. “Look, you wanna impress her, right? I can help. Chicks love me.”  
  
Rhys doubted that.  
  
“And more importantly,” Jack carried on, “I can definitely hit that bottle of yours. So whadda ya say? I just need a _liiittle_ bit of—”  
  
Rhys raised the gun and fired. The shot rang off ...somewhere, disappearing into the night sky. None of the bottles or cans even wobbled in the breeze.

“Wow,” said Jack. “You are bad.”

Sasha blinked, her arms unfolding, softened somewhat by his pitiful shot.

“Okay, well, that was… close,” she said gently, in a voice that suggested otherwise.

“No it wasn’t,” said Jack. “It was pathetic. See? You need my help.”

Rhys closed his eyes and exhaled slowly. It really ought to be easier to ignore a voice coming from your own head.

Misreading his response as disappointment, Sasha nodded toward the rock. “Maybe we should move closer.”

“You don’t need to be closer, you need someone who can shoot,” Jack insisted.

Rhys shook his head at Sasha. “No, it’s okay. I’ll just…”  
  
He fired another shot; this time, at least, it got absorbed by the boulder, even if it was about two feet lower than the row of targets.

“That was… better,” said Sasha, nodding encouragingly. “I mean, still needs some work, but… you hit something!”

It sounded kind of like she was talking to Gortys, which Rhys might have found insulting were he not so distracted by Jack standing in front of him again, shaking his head.  
  
“You’re killing me, cupcake,” Jack said, gesturing desperately. “The whole hokey Partridge family roadshow adventure is hard enough to stomach, but watching you embarrass yourself like this, and in front of a broad, it...  it hurts me, it really does. You gotta let me help, dude. Lemme have some fun. Help me to help you, Rhysie—”

Terrible shot though Rhys was, with Jack standing so close, it was remarkably easy to fire straight through his holographic chest.

Sasha’s forehead crinkled in confusion. “Um…”

Jack looked down at the would-be wound, then folded his arms. “Now, that was just rude.”

Rhys smirked.

Jack rolled his neck like he was cracking imaginary bones and flexed his fingers. “Alright, well, hey, I tried to be nice.”

Rhys had just enough time to register his own alarm before Jack stuck out his right arm and Rhys’ cybernetic arm followed suit. Jack ripped the gun out of Rhys’ left hand, taking control of the trigger.

He fired two shots in quick succession, both shattering one of Sasha’s bottles, before Rhys grabbed at the gun again. In the struggle between right and left, the third shot got fired wildly into the air.

“What the hell, Rhys?” cried Sasha, jumping away from him and looking, for once, truly frightened.

Jack doubled over in laughter; with renewed control of both hands, Rhys took the opportunity to drop the gun to the ground.  
  
“Shit,” said Rhys, stepping back from the gun and raising his arms. He looked over at Sasha, who was still staring at him in horror, tensed and poised like she was ready to fight. “Shit, Sasha, I—”

“What the hell was that?” she demanded.

“That’s—I was—it—” Rhys stammered.

“Oh man,” said Jack, straightening up from his laughter. “Boy, she did not like that, did she?” He shook his head, wiping a tear of mirth from his eye. “Hey, what can you do, you know? It’s always a fine line between ‘impressed’ and ‘terrified’.” He clapped one weightless hand on Rhys’ shoulder. “Well, have fun on date night, kid.”

With that, Jack vanished.

But the relief Rhys normally felt with Jack’s disappearance was muted by the way Sasha was looking at him, like whatever trust he’d managed to earn since they’d met had just evaporated.

_Goddamn it, Jack._

Hands still in the air, Rhys nudged the gun towards her with his foot, and Sasha knelt slowly to pick it up, dusting it off with her sleeve, her eyes fixed on him the entire time.

“Sasha, I’m—I’m sorry,” he said, as earnestly as he could. “I didn’t mean to scare you, that was—it was—”

“Explain.” Sasha’s stare was uncompromising.  

“Right. Yeah.” He swallowed, frantically searching for an explanation that wouldn’t make Sasha any more wary of him than she already was. “Glitch! It was a glitch.” He pointed an accusatory finger at his right arm.

Sasha returned to her full height, clutching her gun protectively, her eyes narrowed.

“A glitch,” she repeated.

It seemed wrong to exploit the technological naivete of someone who shouted “enhance!” at the air, but telling Sasha the truth—that he’d sort-of-accidentally given Handsome Jack control of a gun three feet away from her—seemed like a Bad Idea with a capital Bad.

“Yep,” he said, bolstering the lie with as much confidence as he could. “There’s a targeting program in this—” he waved his metal fingers at her “—standard issue, I guess, never used it before, but I thought I’d give it a try and, well, you saw how that went, so…” He gave what he hoped was a convincingly casual shrug and ran his hand through his hair. “Nothing ever runs right out of the box, right? I mean, they say that, but then you install it and you gotta download updates and... The software probably just needs a patch or… seven. I can fix it, look! Fixing it!”

As the cherry on his cake of lies, he opened his palm, displaying random strings of garbage code that he hoped might look convincing to the uninitiated. Sasha squinted at the code, squinted at him, then slowly relaxed.

“Okay... well, that was weird, and I’m gonna hold onto the gun now,” she said.

“Please do,” Rhys agreed. “All yours.”

Finally comfortable enough to take her eyes off him, Sasha turned to the firing range, easily picking off one of the cans in a single shot. With her turned back to him, Rhys sighed and shut off the fake code, using that hand to rub his neck guiltily instead.

“So…” He watched her shoot another can, fishing for a topic of conversation to distract from his web of deceit. “How long have you been doing this?” he asked.  
  
“What, shooting? Like two minutes, you’ve been here the whole time.”

“No, not this,” he gestured to the targets with his hand. “I mean, _this_.” He gestured broadly to the air around them.

Sasha raised an eyebrow. “Oh, you mean living a life of crime?”

“Hey, your words, not mine.”

“Pretty much forever.” She closed one eye to focus on a target, firing one handed. A bottle exploded with a satisfying crack. “Our mom died when I was three, so…”

Rhys flinched. Oh. Right. “Sorry, I didn’t—”

Sasha shrugged, but her eyes were downcast. “It’s okay. I don’t really remember her.” She looked at him and offered a smile. “Fi says I look like her, so, that’s cool, I guess.” Heaving the gun back up to shoulder height, she took out another bottle. “Anyway, then Fiona took care of us, until I got old enough to pull my own weight.”

Old enough in this context, Rhys realized, probably meant about six or seven, and he frowned. As competent and capable as the sisters now were, imagining them as children, left to their own devices on the streets of Hollow Point, tugged at something in his chest.

“Wow, that’s…” He took a step forward, closing some of the distance that had built between them. “I mean, I almost died, like, fifty times in my first ten minutes on Pandora, and that was as an adult. Being a kid… that’s impressive.”  
  
“Yeah. Well.” Sasha lowered the gun. “I was lucky to have Fi. She was always a quick thinker. And a good liar.” Her lips twisted at a memory, neither a frown nor a smile. “She used to go out to get us food, and sometimes she’d come back with only something for me, and she’d say she was so hungry she ate hers on the way home. You’d be surprised how long I fell for that.”

Rhys didn’t know what to say to that. It felt like he was getting a glimpse of a very different person than the one he’d left sleeping on her jacket by the campfire, and he wasn’t sure Fiona would appreciate him seeing it. Her words at the Atlas facility came back to him: _that’s more than just my friend up there, jackass_. Beneath all the bluster and the sharp tongue and the pointed shoulder pads beat a very big heart.

Caught up in another memory, Sasha grinned again, the gun temporarily forgotten. “Oh, but we used to run this con as kids…” Her eyes lit up as she told the story, and she adopted a theatrical tone of voice. “We’d convince someone we were the daughters of a rich couple, that we’d got lost or run away or been kidnapped and if they just took care of us for a couple days, our parents would be _so_ grateful they’d _definitely_ give a handsome reward.”

Pleased with herself, she looked at him, so infectious Rhys found himself smiling back.

“Really? That worked? People bought that?”

“Oh, all the time. We’re very good.” Her eyes widened innocently, she clutched at his sleeve, and when she spoke her voice was an uncharacteristic simper. “It’s _really_ scary here, Mister, and I know we should’ve stayed in the car like Mom and Dad said, but we’ve never been off Eden-5 before, we just wanted to see, and then there were all these scary men, and—”  
  
Rhys motioned with one hand to cut her off. “Okay, please stop, that’s kind of creepy.”

She laughed, her voice her own again, and dropped his sleeve. “Worked like a charm, most of the time. For a few days we’d get a roof over our heads, hot meals, maybe even beds, and then mysteriously, a few days before our parents were set to return, we’d take off in the night with some food and whatever we could stuff in our pockets.”

Hearing ‘hot meals’ listed as a childhood luxury added another brick to the monument of existential guilt that Rhys had been constructing the entire time he’d be on Pandora. He thought about himself as a kid, tried to imagine sneaking out a stranger’s window with a handful of stolen silverware, and found it impossible to return Sasha’s smile.

“Sasha, don’t take this the wrong way, but that sounds crazy dangerous,” he pointed out.

Her expression turned cold. “Starvation is dangerous.”

She lifted the gun and fired again, and as the bottle shattered, Rhys mentally added another brick.

“Right, yeah, of course, you’re right, sorry, I didn’t mean...” He rubbed his neck again. “Just… I’m really glad you two… you know...” he finished lamely.

“Didn’t meet some grisly fate at the hands of a child-abducting monster?” Sasha raised an eyebrow, but her irritation dissipated. “Fi had a good sense for danger. But most people treated us pretty well, actually. I guess they thought they wouldn’t get much of a reward if we told our parents bad things.” Lowering the gun again, she rested one hand fondly on her bare midriff. “One woman made the best chocolate cake I’ve, like, ever had. We stayed with her for nearly a week.”

“Did you ever think about telling the truth? Maybe—”

Sasha laughed again, but with a bitterness that told him he’d just said something very stupid. “Maybe what, they’d let us stay out of the goodness of their hearts?”

Sensing there was no correct answer to that question, Rhys looked down, grinding a hole in the sand with the toe of his boot.

“Being nice doesn’t change the fact that they were in it for the money,” she said coldly, the anger that always simmered inside her bubbling to the surface. “That’s why everyone does everything. No one cares about a couple of sad Pandoran orphans. Even Felix only kept us around long enough to steal ten million dollars.”

She punctuated it with a bang, but for the first time her shot missed. She fired again, and hit the rock face instead. Growling in frustration, she jerked her arm like she was about to throw the gun to the ground but thought better of it at the last second, then rubbed her eyes with her free hand instead.

Rhys looked at the distance between them, half of him wanting to reach out and the other half pretty sure she’d break his arm if he did. He settled on taking a step closer.

“He must have cared, Sasha,” he said gently. “He wouldn’t have hired Athena if he didn’t.”

But Sasha only glared at him, eyes fierce and furious. “Why are you defending him? You didn’t even _know_ him.”

“I’m just trying to—”  
  
“I know what you’re trying to do!” she snapped. “I know what Fiona’s trying to do! It doesn’t help, okay?!”

This time her aim was perfect; she eliminated the two bottles she’d missed earlier, and the silence that settled afterwards felt louder than the gunshots.

And then she sighed, her shoulders drooping along with the gun.

“I’m not ready to stop being angry yet,” she said, so quietly he almost missed it.

“Well…” Rhys inched closer to her, though he dutifully kept his hands to himself. “Not that I make the rules, or anything, but I’m pretty sure that’s allowed.”

The corner of her mouth twitched, near enough to a smile that he felt a surge of pride.

“Well. Good.” She closed her eyes, took a deep breath, and gathered herself. “The thing is, he knew something was wrong halfway through and he didn’t tell us. It doesn’t matter what his reasons were, that’s _stupid_. That’s how these jobs go south. You can’t keep secrets like that.”

Her words wiped away the satisfaction he’d felt a moment ago, replacing it with something heavy and unpleasant in the pit of his stomach.

He hugged his arms across his chest and looked away from her, nodding vaguely. “Yeah...”

Lost in her own thoughts, Sasha took no notice of his sudden reticence. Instead she pointed to the target, where one lone can remained standing, already half-crumpled from whomever had emptied it.

“One left,” she said, with a bit of forced chipperness. “You wanna try again?”

Rhys turned his head towards her in surprise, arms still folded. “Um… but I…”

“Yeah, yeah, glitch, whatever,” said Sasha, waving one hand flippantly. “You fixed it, right?”

“Yep, that… is what I said I did, isn’t it?” Idiot, scolded a voice in his head that sounded too much like Fiona’s. He stared at the gun, his left hand frozen mid-way towards reaching for it. “I just, ah…”

“It’ll be fine,” she insisted. She held the gun out towards him, the barrel pointing back at herself, and grinned wryly. “Maybe just do it… you know… naturally this time. No cheating.”

“Yeah…” He took the gun in his left hand and held it down at his side, his mechanical arm still clutched as tightly to his chest as he could keep it.

Once again his heart seemed to be doing double time, drowning out everything else. His mouth felt dry. He looked down at the gun, slippery in his clammy palm, and then up at Sasha, her wide green eyes trusting and oh-so-tempting in the darkness.

He could tell her, right now, and maybe she’d understand. Maybe it wouldn’t change anything, maybe she’d appreciate the honesty, maybe she’d even, miraculously, have some idea that helped, somehow, some suggestion that made it a little bit easier to live with a not-so-metaphorical devil on your shoulder, whispering in your ear.

Or maybe she’d hate him like she hated Felix. Maybe she’d look at him like she had earlier tonight, fear and distrust and a renewed bone-deep resentment for everything Hyperion. Maybe she’d want nothing more to do with him. The possibility was more frightening than everything else on Pandora.

He knew what Jack would tell him to do—maybe that was reason enough to do the opposite.

“Sasha…” Rhys started, but his voice died, and he had to try again. “Listen, Sasha, there’s something—”

But a piercing shriek cut him off before he could finish. He and Sasha turned in time to see a rakk perch right on Sasha’s chosen rock, its enormous wings sending the last can clattering to the ground.

“Oh come _on_ ,” whined Rhys.

“Shoot it!” Sasha yelled, and then, when he remained frozen, “Rhys!”

With an awkward cry of his own, he raised the gun and fired. The rakk was a much larger target than a bottle, and he was fairly certain he hit it, but it only shrieked again and lifted off of the rock.  
  
“I... think I just made it angry.”

“Oh, for…” Sasha yanked the gun out of his hands. “Give me that!”

It only took Sasha two shots to down the rakk, its body tumbling out of the air to land a few feet from them in a cloud of dust.

Rhys grimaced as he looked at it, crumpled on the sand. “God, this planet, it is just non-stop. Seriously.”

Sasha rolled her eyes. “It’s just one stupid rakk, it’s—”

But she stopped short at the sound of another rakk cry, further in the distance, and a rapidly approaching black spot on the horizon.

“Okay,” she said, “time to run.”

Her open mouth split into a grin, and Rhys gaped at her. “Are you enjoying this?”

Sasha only shrugged. But she grabbed his hand in hers before she took off, and as he was pulled along for the ride, moral dilemma forgotten, Rhys felt himself grinning too. 


End file.
